The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Mario 64 had undercurrents of a dreamy, abstract, dare-I-say vaporwave-y quality that I attribute to the undersung influence of SGI specifically and early American 3D animation in general on its development that I think is a big part of its enduring appeal; the Galaxies and Odyssey are technically superior and more polished and certainly classics in their own right, but even among younger generations it seems like Mario 64 remains the definitive 3D Mario.
My favourite demonstration of this is a comparison between The Secret Aquarium bonus stage [0] with one of the animations in The Mind's Eye [1] (technically this is from Symbolics rather than SGI, but 3D animators of the time were in metaphorical conversation with each other), but this is maybe the most explicit example of just how direct that connection was.
Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD...
High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it.
In SGI tech support (East team '96, Unix team '97 - my Indigo was dewi.csd.sgi.com), it was the way we copied files around (the Troops had just come out) and also had a internal tool that would pop up a window on someone else's machine to get their attention (if they weren't directly paying attention to the multicast chat program...)
I remember SGIs having incredibly poor security, at least with IRIX 5.x. Authentication for X11 was totally non-existent in the default configuration. If someone was logged in from the console, you could pop windows up on their screen (and sniff the keyboard) from remote.
Something similar was possible with a PDP and teletypes at undergrad in the 70s. We had great fun sending (what looked like) operator messages to users telling them to log off or their teletype would BLOW UP.
And if you were teenage college students way more risque clips than Star Wars :-) One of my fondest memory is when a sophomore buddy of mine does a telnet and sets the display to local ip and starts clicking on random audio files. The operator on the other side is a freshman. Comes running to the other room sees my bud and being one year senior asks - dude that SGI is making weird noises. Realizing what has happened my buddy quips - ah it makes those noises when it is heavily loaded :-D
Another issue some SGI (O2) had: they didn't clear the entire video/memory buffer between logins. So, occasionally, when you logged in on the console, you'd see random images from the previous user on the screen. Apparently the user before me was frequently surfing porn :(. After that the group lead updated the MOTD to explicitly say that was not allowed.
you could do this on macs too with the "say" command. Back in late 2000s we were utilizing the xcode method of pooling developer workstations together to increase build speed. This meant most of us just shared creds and allowed colleagues to shell-in or remote-in to change settings etc. I am sometimes guilty of shelling in and running say "i can't do that dave" or something to random unsuspecting colleages.
Like raising dinosaurs from their blood found in amber-encapsulated mosquitoes dug up in mines deep underground, archaic software has been resurrected with modern technology because computer scientists were so excited they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should!
That 3d file manager was called 'fsn'. Then there is a gtk/Linux port called 'fsv'. I maintain a version updated to gtk+3 at https://github.com/jabl/fsv . Unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I haven't had the time to port to gtk4 nor add some missing features.
When that movie came out, I was in school and living in special interest housing for computer science students. A bunch of us went to see the movie together, and when she said that line we all erupted in laughter, much to the confusion of the rest of the theater.
I started my career at Oracle in 1994, and I still remember what a big deal it was when the Silicon Graphics (wasn’t officially SGI yet) “Magic Bus” would come and park in the Redwood Shores parking lot and we would all line up to go inside and see some of these demos. I felt at the time like I was really in the future.
Similar timing, I had a high school internship at the National Cancer Institute at Ft. Detrick, MD in 1994-95, and the lab down the hall had some SGI iron and a glove (I don't remember what the glove hardware was, if it was SGI or 3rd-party or custom) for manipulating 3D renders of folded proteins. Incredible stuff, same "in the future" feeling.
Around 1995 or 1996, a friend said he'd played a speederbike graphics/game demo running on an SGI system at some kind of touring SGI promotional event.
I've never been able to find screenshots or video of it, and was hoping it might be included here. No such luck. I don't suppose anyone remembers it?
I don't think so. His description was that it was speeder bikes in a forest, like Return of the Jedi, but it was mostly a demo of the graphics capabilities, not a complete game.
e.g. I remember he specifically said you could fly in any direction you wanted, but there was a wall at the edge of the forest, as opposed to it wrapping around or having a non-inmersion-breaking reason for being constrained to the one area.
Did you actually provide a shorts link? What's the world coming to? At first, I thought maybe it makes sense since it could be updated for mobile. Nope. It immediately changed aspect ratio so it is portrait oriented piece with letter boxing. :face-palm: yet another square peg/round hole example
otherwise, looks like it might be fun to play for a few minutes
The bounce demos all show the x29.. I wanted to see the Martini and the WV in particular, I remember those as very impressive at the time (shadowing etc).
Maybe I have to fire up my old SGI Octane..
Back when I had my Indigo XS24 up and running as my main workstation, I remember they used to put out periodic "Hot Mix" demo CDs with a bunch of the latest third party software to try out. Loading the demos off the CD was excruciatingly slow, but I definitely looked forward to getting the disks in the mail.
Ours a SGI 4D-220 in a molecular modeling lab, these demos made everything else look sick - we had the horsepower; engineers and programmers upset they didn't; trad CS and admins mad because I admin'd them as they were DEC and IBM snobs, mocked UNIX as a toy. Also Evans and Sutherland, a NeXT machine, MicroVAX, Macs used for building a hardware pulse sequencers for 3D NMR, custom DSP for 2D NMRs, (4) million dollar superconducting NMRs and an entire lab - all the cool toys of the day, life was good.
At the SIGGRAPH '96, where they launched the N64, SGI had an awesome stage show: there was an MC and a user with a VR setup on, some Onyx refrigerators behind them, and a big screen showing the VR view.
It was awesome - they were basically building New Orleans with legos: open a toolbox filing cabinet, choose a brick, run it all the way down the block, run that line of bricks up 200 feet to create the side of a building, rinse repeat.
Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :(
Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.
SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.
Back around 1997 or so I saw the first Map Tile example hosted on an Origin 200. Basically just Google Earth minus the landmarks or directions, but at the time it was mind blowing to start way out in orbit and be able to zoom in on any spot on Earth. The machine was next to a 19" rack with multiple large RAID arrays feeding the machine, and when you panned around you could see all of the lights on the front of the rack blink in unison.
I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.
What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.
Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
I worked with an SGI 2400T workstation and it came with a 4:3 aspect high resolution monitor (4K I think, different from today's 4K). Later workstations probably had wider screens. However even that old machine could display to a wide variety of screen sizes. I connected ours to an NTSC projector and they were often used for rendering movie computer graphics (though rendering doesn't depend on the display size). If I remember correctly the pixels were square by default, but there was a lot of control over rendering and display. NTSC at that time wasn't even a very firm standard, lots of companies implemented it differently and hi-res displays tended to be custom with no standards at all (used for air traffic control for example).
Anyone remember a MSDos capture the flag game where you controlled jello blobs like the jello demo [0], went left to right in 3D and controlled with the mouse. Been trying to remember the name of it.
I had an Onyx back in the day, and I remember one of the demos being a photo of a lion or tiger, and clicking on the photo caused it to warp in three dimensions like a sheet of rubber. Does anyone remember this or am I hallucinating?
About Flight: My Indy had a weird glitch. After leaving the machine on overnight invariably in the morning I'd find it running 'Flight' with a plane crashed face down as the last thing on the screen. Complete mystery. So, one night I decided enough is enough and I need to figure this out. 2:30 am, footsteps on the staircase. Now, I don't know about you but that even if you expect it that's such a chilling sound. Next thing I know Flight is up and running. I snap on the office lights to see my five year old that had figured out my password by repeated observation blink like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He cried for a bit and I asked him 'why?' and he said he wanted to show us he can fly but he can't get past the landing part... He could fly just fine though!
So looking forward to trying this! What was the one where a car was driving through a town with a few city blocks? The traffic lights would cycle way too fast…
One of my favorite demos. First time seeing physics and interactive 3d combined. SGI had to change the name to 'newton' because 'jello' is a trademark.
The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Here's a decent comparison: https://www.resetera.com/threads/super-mario-64-took-its-3d-...
Mario 64 had undercurrents of a dreamy, abstract, dare-I-say vaporwave-y quality that I attribute to the undersung influence of SGI specifically and early American 3D animation in general on its development that I think is a big part of its enduring appeal; the Galaxies and Odyssey are technically superior and more polished and certainly classics in their own right, but even among younger generations it seems like Mario 64 remains the definitive 3D Mario.
My favourite demonstration of this is a comparison between The Secret Aquarium bonus stage [0] with one of the animations in The Mind's Eye [1] (technically this is from Symbolics rather than SGI, but 3D animators of the time were in metaphorical conversation with each other), but this is maybe the most explicit example of just how direct that connection was.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARbWJX-P1oM
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYBes8ki3lo
Didn’t Jurassic Park have a similar interface running on the workstations?
Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD...
High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it.
In SGI tech support (East team '96, Unix team '97 - my Indigo was dewi.csd.sgi.com), it was the way we copied files around (the Troops had just come out) and also had a internal tool that would pop up a window on someone else's machine to get their attention (if they weren't directly paying attention to the multicast chat program...)
I remember SGIs having incredibly poor security, at least with IRIX 5.x. Authentication for X11 was totally non-existent in the default configuration. If someone was logged in from the console, you could pop windows up on their screen (and sniff the keyboard) from remote.
> Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it.
That plus the lack of a default /etc/shadow, because reasons, made for fun times. ;-)
Something similar was possible with a PDP and teletypes at undergrad in the 70s. We had great fun sending (what looked like) operator messages to users telling them to log off or their teletype would BLOW UP.
And if you were teenage college students way more risque clips than Star Wars :-) One of my fondest memory is when a sophomore buddy of mine does a telnet and sets the display to local ip and starts clicking on random audio files. The operator on the other side is a freshman. Comes running to the other room sees my bud and being one year senior asks - dude that SGI is making weird noises. Realizing what has happened my buddy quips - ah it makes those noises when it is heavily loaded :-D
Another issue some SGI (O2) had: they didn't clear the entire video/memory buffer between logins. So, occasionally, when you logged in on the console, you'd see random images from the previous user on the screen. Apparently the user before me was frequently surfing porn :(. After that the group lead updated the MOTD to explicitly say that was not allowed.
you could do this on macs too with the "say" command. Back in late 2000s we were utilizing the xcode method of pooling developer workstations together to increase build speed. This meant most of us just shared creds and allowed colleagues to shell-in or remote-in to change settings etc. I am sometimes guilty of shelling in and running say "i can't do that dave" or something to random unsuspecting colleages.
Like raising dinosaurs from their blood found in amber-encapsulated mosquitoes dug up in mines deep underground, archaic software has been resurrected with modern technology because computer scientists were so excited they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should!
1/10 for usefulness but 10/10 for cool
It's a unix system! I know this.
That 3d file manager was called 'fsn'. Then there is a gtk/Linux port called 'fsv'. I maintain a version updated to gtk+3 at https://github.com/jabl/fsv . Unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I haven't had the time to port to gtk4 nor add some missing features.
In a just world, we would have this on every computer, instead of Candy Crush.
When that movie came out, I was in school and living in special interest housing for computer science students. A bunch of us went to see the movie together, and when she said that line we all erupted in laughter, much to the confusion of the rest of the theater.
I am getting old. That reference is from 1993.
I will not spoil it but for those not in the know: https://imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
FWIW i haven't seen that movie but i've heard this reference A LOT :-P
Not as technically impressive, but this compilation of Nvidia (nVidia?) tech demos 1998-2025 is historically interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfWSJvKFMPE
That is soooo interesting! Worth a submission to HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330237
Silicon Graphics was the thing (in computer graphics) in the beginning of the nineties
I started my career at Oracle in 1994, and I still remember what a big deal it was when the Silicon Graphics (wasn’t officially SGI yet) “Magic Bus” would come and park in the Redwood Shores parking lot and we would all line up to go inside and see some of these demos. I felt at the time like I was really in the future.
Similar timing, I had a high school internship at the National Cancer Institute at Ft. Detrick, MD in 1994-95, and the lab down the hall had some SGI iron and a glove (I don't remember what the glove hardware was, if it was SGI or 3rd-party or custom) for manipulating 3D renders of folded proteins. Incredible stuff, same "in the future" feeling.
SGI reality center had a glove option. I can't find a pic of it though.
NVidia is the thing because they hired key people from SGI
and ATI.
Around 1995 or 1996, a friend said he'd played a speederbike graphics/game demo running on an SGI system at some kind of touring SGI promotional event.
I've never been able to find screenshots or video of it, and was hoping it might be included here. No such luck. I don't suppose anyone remembers it?
Was it vroom by any chance? A slot car racing game in space: https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/irix/man6/vroom.6.html
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/imguo4oUd-c?app=desktop
I don't think so. His description was that it was speeder bikes in a forest, like Return of the Jedi, but it was mostly a demo of the graphics capabilities, not a complete game.
e.g. I remember he specifically said you could fly in any direction you wanted, but there was a wall at the edge of the forest, as opposed to it wrapping around or having a non-inmersion-breaking reason for being constrained to the one area.
A networked multiplayer version of that seems like it could be quite entertaining.
Years ago I was invovled in getting something similar built for Google IO and Chrome - https://youtu.be/KOCM9_qGccY
This is really cool. The soundtrack is especially fitting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT0k99hCY5I
Did you actually provide a shorts link? What's the world coming to? At first, I thought maybe it makes sense since it could be updated for mobile. Nope. It immediately changed aspect ratio so it is portrait oriented piece with letter boxing. :face-palm: yet another square peg/round hole example
otherwise, looks like it might be fun to play for a few minutes
YouTube changed 1:1 aspect ratio videos to be shorts a while back :(
GLTron or Armagetron Advanced?
The bounce demos all show the x29.. I wanted to see the Martini and the WV in particular, I remember those as very impressive at the time (shadowing etc). Maybe I have to fire up my old SGI Octane..
Back when I had my Indigo XS24 up and running as my main workstation, I remember they used to put out periodic "Hot Mix" demo CDs with a bunch of the latest third party software to try out. Loading the demos off the CD was excruciatingly slow, but I definitely looked forward to getting the disks in the mail.
Great times working at SGI back in the 1980s, lots of long hours, lots of fun inventing things that needed to be invented. Still miss the MIPS.
1992 here. Just checking in.
related: old demoscene demos running in the browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40241290
Reminds me walking Germanys Cebit each year to convince someone to sell me an SGI.
Ours a SGI 4D-220 in a molecular modeling lab, these demos made everything else look sick - we had the horsepower; engineers and programmers upset they didn't; trad CS and admins mad because I admin'd them as they were DEC and IBM snobs, mocked UNIX as a toy. Also Evans and Sutherland, a NeXT machine, MicroVAX, Macs used for building a hardware pulse sequencers for 3D NMR, custom DSP for 2D NMRs, (4) million dollar superconducting NMRs and an entire lab - all the cool toys of the day, life was good.
At the SIGGRAPH '96, where they launched the N64, SGI had an awesome stage show: there was an MC and a user with a VR setup on, some Onyx refrigerators behind them, and a big screen showing the VR view.
It was awesome - they were basically building New Orleans with legos: open a toolbox filing cabinet, choose a brick, run it all the way down the block, run that line of bricks up 200 feet to create the side of a building, rinse repeat.
Would love to see that one again.
Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :(
Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.
SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.
Back around 1997 or so I saw the first Map Tile example hosted on an Origin 200. Basically just Google Earth minus the landmarks or directions, but at the time it was mind blowing to start way out in orbit and be able to zoom in on any spot on Earth. The machine was next to a 19" rack with multiple large RAID arrays feeding the machine, and when you panned around you could see all of the lights on the front of the rack blink in unison.
I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.
What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.
Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
I worked with an SGI 2400T workstation and it came with a 4:3 aspect high resolution monitor (4K I think, different from today's 4K). Later workstations probably had wider screens. However even that old machine could display to a wide variety of screen sizes. I connected ours to an NTSC projector and they were often used for rendering movie computer graphics (though rendering doesn't depend on the display size). If I remember correctly the pixels were square by default, but there was a lot of control over rendering and display. NTSC at that time wasn't even a very firm standard, lots of companies implemented it differently and hi-res displays tended to be custom with no standards at all (used for air traffic control for example).
They used non-square pixels and none of the demos have been stretched appropriately.
I remember the SGI workstations in our campus lab having such an absurdly curved surface.
It made other contemporary CRTs feel like flat screens by comparison.
Anyone remember a MSDos capture the flag game where you controlled jello blobs like the jello demo [0], went left to right in 3D and controlled with the mouse. Been trying to remember the name of it.
[0] https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/jello/web/jello_...
[dead]
Everything 404?
Sad
They seem to work through buttonfly, just not directly through the other links
http://sgi-demos.github.io/
The maintainer changed a path, fixed the code (https://github.com/sgi-demos/sgi-demos/issues/2#issuecomment...), but forgot to update the readme. I have submitted a PR. Here are the fixed links with the original commentary:
---
Working demos
- Buttonfly: https://sgi-demos.github.io/
- Bounce: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/bounce/web/bounc...
- Ideas: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/ideas/web/ideas_...
- Insect: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/insect/web/insec...
- Jello: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/jello/web/jello_...
- Logo: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/logo/web/logo_fu...
- Twilight: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/twilight/web/twi...
Somewhat working demos
- Flight: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/flight/web/fligh... (cockpit glitches, planes too slow in web version, night mode 'shimmers', no network play")
- Newave: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/newave/web/newav... (no mesh editing, no popup menus, only wireframe)
- Arena: https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/arena/web/arena_... (no network play)
Readme is fixed, thanks for the PR!
I had an Onyx back in the day, and I remember one of the demos being a photo of a lion or tiger, and clicking on the photo caused it to warp in three dimensions like a sheet of rubber. Does anyone remember this or am I hallucinating?
yep, this is an SGI demo, but I remember it with a dog, not a tiger :)
It could have been a dog!
WASM = fire up all the fans
hard to believe that an SGI demo on modern hardware would require that much
Ran on my cheap android tablet.
Smooth, impressive
Nobody said it didn't run. It ran everything including the fans at max
I wish they had "Tranquility" in there, this was a really nice game on Irix.
There were Mac OS9 and OS X versions of this. I still have the game (v6.0 from 2006) on my laptop, but it stopped working many OS versions ago.
Any links?
About Flight: My Indy had a weird glitch. After leaving the machine on overnight invariably in the morning I'd find it running 'Flight' with a plane crashed face down as the last thing on the screen. Complete mystery. So, one night I decided enough is enough and I need to figure this out. 2:30 am, footsteps on the staircase. Now, I don't know about you but that even if you expect it that's such a chilling sound. Next thing I know Flight is up and running. I snap on the office lights to see my five year old that had figured out my password by repeated observation blink like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He cried for a bit and I asked him 'why?' and he said he wanted to show us he can fly but he can't get past the landing part... He could fly just fine though!
So looking forward to trying this! What was the one where a car was driving through a town with a few city blocks? The traffic lights would cycle way too fast…
I miss the Barcelona Pavilion walkthrough demo.
Me too. One of the first interactive 3d demos I ever saw, back in 1990. Have the Pavilion model, demo is on my todo list.
Wow when i did the jelly demo instantly when it bounced i started hearing super mario 64 noises in my head, so cool. Great work!
One of my favorite demos. First time seeing physics and interactive 3d combined. SGI had to change the name to 'newton' because 'jello' is a trademark.
Hello! README is fixed!
This is a project of nostalgia and I love all the nostalgic comments.
I spent a lot of time as a child playing the flight simulator demo, this brought back a lot of good memories
I remember the Crionics & Silents take on the jello demo:
https://youtu.be/OZTnR3FpUEA?t=412
... except that this was on a 7MHz chip.
I would like to see dogfight and Mekton.